


Standing on Your Bones

by leaves_girl



Series: Torn and Mended [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cannon Compliant, Dark, Gen, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leaves_girl/pseuds/leaves_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean struggles to adjust to life after Purgatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standing on Your Bones

On the first day, Dean paced inside Rufus’s cabin, impatiently waiting for his little brother to call him back. The second and third day, he plastered the walls with extra wards and rigged traps for the floor and windows. Days four through six were spent fortifying the woods and driveway. The phone rang, Benny checking in, but there was nothing for Dean to tell him. Sam would be there soon. The seventh day, Dean catalogued, cleaned, and sharpened the knives.

By the end of the first week, he was antsy to be moving, skin crawling with the growing probability that something might come foraging after the endless cans of food, or worse, be drawn by the smell of his human shit. He itched to wash and change clothes, but hard won experience told him not to get naked without someone watching his back. Still, he held out a second week, composing rants about prodigal brothers.

On the fifteenth day, Dean was done waiting. He took a bath, scythe on tub rim at all times. Screw Sam anyway.

Dean hiked to the nearest town, hotwired a CRV, and went back to the hunt. His brother could catch up when he called back. It was safer to be moving.

His credit cards lay expired in the woods in another dimension, and no one would play pool with him at any of the three bars he visited, the pansies. It was all right, though, the groceries on every third street corner had food behind easy locks, and he didn’t need much else to get him by.

The Internet would be helpful, though, to wade through all the human killers and find the monsters. He tried going to the library first, but all the computer terminals were against the wall. Putting his back to a room full of whispers and near-silent footfalls was more than anyone could expect him to handle, especially since he’d been forced to leave his scythe in the car. He ended up lifting a laptop. Not like the woman he stole it from really needed it anyways.

He hunkered down at a pay-by-the-hour, picking the lock to get in and then barricading the door with a chair under the handle. With his back to a support beam and the door and window in peripheral view, he plugged in his plundered goods and got to work.

 He searched for missing hearts, because nothing got the blood pumping like ganking a werewolf. He did find heartless corpses, but they were turning up exactly six months apart in pairs clear across the country from each other. It didn’t sound like werewolves, more like witches, maybe. He shouldn’t hunt witches without Sam.

A little more digging led to bloody maulings at Yosemite. The authorities thought it was a black bear, but the photos had Dean hoping for a windigo. It made him twitchy on the long drive to hear nothing but rushing wind outside the car. The park itself was so familiar that even after spotting the hulking sillouhette, he tread carefully, waiting for the perfect opening to turn and confront it. He spent minutes teasing, testing, waiting for some sudden shift or show of supernatural strength. When he realized his opponent really was nothing but a rabid black bear, he huffed in disgust and went in for the kill.   _Jumping at shadows_ , he thought to himself.

 After that was a naiad infestation in Door County. Hacking off slimy heads almost let him drown out the voices whispering that only the stupidest monsters and prey traveled alone.

He took a ghost hunt outside Albuquerque.  The shooting and ducking were fun and all, but ghost hunts had somehow lost their easy familiarity.  He hadn't done any salt'n'burns during his year away, because nothing had really burned in Purgatory. Sometimes, Benny would eat what they killed. Starvation had proved impossible, but there was a constant, gnawing hunger that had nothing to do with full bellies and everything to do with bloody lips. Dean remembered it from his own brief stint as a vampire, and didn’t begrudge Benny the occasional meal, completely believing the dead man’s claims that it made him stronger. Some of the monsters Benny hadn’t eaten had come back.

There was something about the heavily salted flames, crackling first with popping maggots and next with breaking bones, that had him looking over and up to where family should be. He almost left another voicemail message, but the phone he’d stolen was out of power. By the time he found a pay phone, he’d decided to meet up with Benny instead of begging for his brother yet again. There was a joke Benny had told a skin walker he’d eaten: Dogs begged, which was why none of them made it long in purgatory. Mercy was for the dead. 

Benny was glad to hear from him, and happy to hunt with him, and relieved to have a friend watching his back as he crept through the nest of the vamp that killed him, angling to return the favor. 

As they cut a bloody path towards Benny’s sire, Dean wondered why he’d never gotten his own revenge on anyone who’d killed him.  The demon that crashed into the impala had escaped.  Sam had killed Lilith.  Lucifer had killed Gabriel.  Maybe he could take Benny to go meet Roy and Walt after this, drag them out of whatever rat-hole they were infesting and give them a two-day head start.  Back in Purgatory, Dean’s lack of attention to his surroundings might have gotten him and Benny killed, but these vamps were soft, more used to slurping easy blood than hunting or being hunted by worthy opponents. 

 Of course it all went sideways. Whatever epic romance Benny and his girl had going, Dean had been a Winchester long enough to know that love turns everything to shit.  One minute it was fierce kisses and tender words, the next it was plans of piracy and bloody deaths, and the minute after that the woman’s head was on the floor, Dean’s scythe in Benny’s hands.  He sincerely wished that Andrea chic good luck.  Nothing in Purgatory gave mercy, but nothing in Purgatory deserved it, either.  She could do well there.

 

* * *

 

There was a burned-out, corpseless grave in northern Michigan holding a small iron box. In the box rested a scrap of torn, bloody leather, carefully secreted away in case the worst should happen.

Benny was doubtful that the spell would work, nattering on about how tracking spells required flesh, and the leather belonged to a long-dead cow while the blood was obviously Dean’s. Dean told him that family shared blood, and that they had all lost quite a bit the day a semi had torn this leather. Benny scoffed and might have muttered something about metal and souls, but for the sake of their deep and abiding friendship Dean didn’t listen. 

The spell worked, leading them to a picket-fence-infested suburbia on the east side of Texas. He would drag Sam out of whatever two-story monstrosity he was bunking in and ask him just when answering the phone had become such a hard concept to master.  In fact, a screaming confrontation might be just the kick in the pants his little brother needed, shocking the neighbors and showing him that no matter how long he played house, it would always be a lie. Deep down, Sam would always be a hunter.

 He nearly laughed in relief at seeing his baby sliding down the street, gleaming in the sun bold as you please and coming to a stop in a driveway a few doors down. His world dropped away when Kevin fucking Tran opened the driver’s side door.

He never really remembered the next few minutes. He had the vague impression of someone yelling, and someone tugging on his jacket, and of bitter, desperate laughing because this was just the sort of screaming confrontation he’d been imagining, and his brother didn’t even care, and wasn’t that just the biggest joke ever? Those minutes would always be a dark blur, snapping back into focus as scalding tea hit the back of this throat. He was in the Tran’s bright, clean living room, Benny beside him with a hand on his knee, reassuring and restraining. Kevin was across the table from him nursing a broken nose, and Sam was dead.

“How do I get him back?” he asked, and there was a moment of awkward silence.

“How did it happen?” Benny asked, and the Trans jumped into gear answering this much-less-important question. Crowly had taken Kevin so he could read the demon tablet: the cheat codes to demon hunting, including how to close the gates to hell, all of them, permanently. Kevin had escaped, and turned to Sam for help. Sam had closed the gates, and now he was gone.

“Cure a demon? No one even knew how to kill them before Dean, right? How’d he know how to cure it?”

“It was on the tablet. Everything was on the tablet. You should have seen the two of them, pouring over notes at the dining room table for months on end as if it were ACT-prep. I hear Sam went to Stanford. That is a very good school. You should be proud. He even helped Kevin with his entrance essay. No academic dishonesty, you understand, he just gave my son some helpful advice on how to spin his extracurriculars. Kevin will start back Spring Semester. We are very grateful.”

“Mom! The man saved the world from all demons, forever. Don’t you think his grieving brother might find my college plans a little…peripheral?”

“Someday you’ll be president, and can make salt-lined panic rooms part of the building codes, make cremation mandatory for violent deaths, maybe even put hunters on the government bankroll. Don’t talk to me about peripheral.”

“Sounds like Dean’s brother was a real stand-up guy, worrying about your future on top of everything else. Did he happen to leave any personal effects? I’m sure it would mean a lot to Dean.”

“He’ll take the car, of course. It is very rare and valuable, and I have been assured it is very beautiful. Also, it gets horrible gas mileage, and conveys an impression to the neighborhood that my son is some sort of rebellious hooligan upstart.”

“Sam traveled light, and he put all his books somewhere, a cabin maybe, before the last trial.  I think maybe he suspected. Anyway, there’s just a duffel upstairs. Maybe we should get it?”

"Maybe we should."

"Deaths are always hard.  When Kevin's father passed, I didn't think I'd make it through.  I survived by studying for my real estate license, making sure my son had all the support he needed.  It took a while for me to  realize that I had to live in the present.  No matter how much I missed my husband, there were people who still needed me."  Her voice almost covered the murmur of her son's from above them.

Dean spent hours going through the equipment in the trunk. Nothing was dusty, but they were cold in a way he remembered from the last time his brother had died saving the world and left him alone. He recognized everything but a thick pair of glasses and a spool of red thread. He wouldn’t ask Kevin.

Benny sat beside him on the drive to Wyoming, because if Sam had wanted to reserve shotgun, he should have damn well chosen to be there to sit in it. “What was he like?” the vampire asked, but Dean didn’t know the answer. He thought about how his brother stood up for Lenore, and Madison, and Amy, and Ruby, and the antichrist. How he would drink demon blood to kill Lillith but it took a soul-ectomy to get him to sleep with a hooker. How he’d considered a genuine virgin sacrifice once on the say-so of his demon lover, but scolded Dean for lying to his hook-ups. How he offered to turn Dean into Frankenstein’s monster to keep him from going to hell and becoming a demon. How the whole damn world, Dean and Adam included, had been resigned to the choice of burning in an epic showdown on the fields of Armageddon or drowning slowly in a sea of Croat-infected blood, and Sam had out-stubborned them all and found a better way. He thought of witness after witness falling to his dewy-eyed look, and then of Bobby confessing that he liked Dean best. How smart he was to get into Stanford, and how stupid to leave his and Jess’s apartment unwarded in his desperate bid for normal. “He’s my brother. You’ll see when you meet him.” Benny stiffened in his borrowed seat, but wisely kept his mouth shut.

Dean insisted on going to the graveyard alone. It was just as he remembered, except for the absence of one very important mausoleum. The seal in its place was smooth as polished marble and warmer than it should have been so early in the morning. The red veins running through it might have been mistaken for iron.

Twenty-seven natural gates, plus sixty-five cracks under the seals that broke on earth, plus the hole Lucifer had made for Death, and the holes in Lawrence and Detroit they’d made for Lucifer, made ninety-five doorways to hell. Sam’s body and soul had been torn to ninety-five pieces and turned to this…mortar to keep the demons out. He ran his hand over the seal mindlessly.

Benny dropped the duffle in his lap around noon. “Tell me about your brother,” he said as he dropped down beside it.

“Tall. Prissy. Stupid hair. Went to Stanford. This is just like him, you know, taking what’s always been and setting it sideways just because he thinks he could do better. He’s always asking why, why not, why can’t I. Never knows when he should let it go.”

With exaggerated care, the vampire picked a blade of grass and tied it in on itself, giving the final product a nod before biting into it. “Yeah, sounds like a relation of yours,” he muttered to the sky.

Dean stood up, grabbing the duffle and his scythe, giving his friend a cross look. “Don’t tell me that the vampire who made it back from Purgatory is about to give me the 'What's dead should stay dead' lecture.”

Benny’s smile showed his age. “Never me, brother.”

 

* * *

  
Dad’s journal had one hundred fifty-two pages. It always had one hundred fifty-two pages. Interestingly, they were not always the _same_ one hundred fifty-two pages. The pages moved around, no great feat for what was technically a three-ring binder. More impressive were the pages that disappeared and reappeared as needed, and the fact that no matter how many pages Sam or Dean wrote on or stapled newspaper clippings to, thelast fourteen were always blank. Sam had once set up an algorithm, counting up the sketches, photos, and words on a random sampling of pages, and estimated they had a gigabyte of information stored in there. The journal had been cutting edge, back before laptops and the Internet.

Now every page Dean flipped to had the words _They got me out_  written across the top in Sam’s neat hand.

About half the pages showing up were new to the journal, and even the ones he recognized, fairies and valkyeries and djin, had new annotations. The djin page, for example, now had “not alpha, check for offshoots/ hybrids” scrawled beneath the note about lamb’s blood. The fairies had been a succinct one-page summary when Dean had left, but now each type had a page with information not only on weaknesses, but also motivations. New were the pages on the origins of Snow White and Thumbelina, on falling angels and turkey bones. The page about monkey paws not only had the _They got me out_ across the top, but the shakey words _I don’t belong here_ scrawled below it.

Pages fell out of normal binders all the time, but not Dad’s journal. The tabs meant to open the three rings had been stuck for as long as Dean remembered, and any page ripped out along the ring holes had a tendency to find its way back in. The only foolproof way to remove a page was to tear a line straight down it out past the ring holes, removing the content but leaving some paper behind. On the rare occasions these remnants showed up, they sorted the rest of the book chronologically. When he had left, the only missing pages had pertained to Adam.  Now, there was another.

Holding tight to the torn page, Dean flipped through carefully, deciding it fell after fighting Sam Hain and before meeting Anna. To his mind’s eye, the whole time was a wash of nightmares and lies, but he couldn’t remember any important hunts between the two. Still, it was a start.

_They got me out_ , his brother had written. Yeah, that was the idea.

 

* * *

  
_“You’re late, Dean,” his little brother scolded him._

_“What?” He spun around, trying to orient himself among the cake and streamers and giggling children. Sam couldn’t have been more than six, and the rest looked barely older, for all that their eyes flashed black. “What are you talking about?”_

_“For my birthday, remember? You’re always too late.” A tiny boy dressed like a soldier grabbed the cake knife and stabbed Sam in the back, but his brother continued to look at Dean expectantly._

_“I…I’m sorry,” he offered helplessly._

_The children all laughed, except for Sam. He looked up at Dean and patted him comfortingly on the leg. “That’s okay, I got myself a present.”_

_Dean had to smile, because this was Sam through and through. “Yeah? And what’s that?” Shooting his big brother a mischievous grin, Sam turned back to his cake and candles, taking a deep breath._

_Then he jerked and let out a great, hacking cough, blood dripping down his chin and onto the cake, causing the candles to sizzle and die. He looked back up and smiled and suddenly Dean was reminded of all the times that the blood on his brother’s lips hadn’t been his own. And the cake wasn’t a cake anymore, it was-_

_“Lillith’s head on a plate,” Sammy answered, except the voice wasn’t little Sammy’s. It was Sam’s, all grown up and ready to end the world_.

 

* * *

 

Dean remembered now, the restaurant with its magic fountain. They’d melted down that coin, sure, but there had to be others, or genies, or fairies, someone he could go to and wish his brother back. He surfed his stolen laptop and even braved a few libraries looking for leads, but every time he found what he thought was new information, he went to write it down and flipped to a page with the exact same lore or legend already written in his brother’s neat hand. Sam had already followed every lead, and only one had been too close, too tempting, for Sam to trust himself with.  The only lead worth tearing out had been the wishing well.  Dean narrowed his search to cursed coins and medalions. Benny said nothing, just looked on with eyes that seemed older by the day.

“Crime’s down,” the other man mentioned one day, leaning against a headstone and chewing his straw. “Not that you’d hear it from the newsmongers, but there’s less murder and rape this year than there was last. Especially the darkest sorts: mass murder, serial killing, incestuous pedophilia, cannibalism, it's all dropped since what your brother did.”

“Remind me to have Sam tell you about the possessed serial killer we exorcised,” Dean replied absently from his position sprawled on the marble seal that used to be part of his brother.

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” the vampire rumbled doubtfully, but Dean was too caught up in the tome on his lap to notice.

 

* * *

 

Benny finally confronted him the night they drove to a cemetery in Mississippi to exhume a certain grave and take a very special necklace from its corpse. “Should we maybe take a breath and think about this before you’re holding the thing in your hand?”

“What’s there to think about?”

“Maybe how to word it so as the gates to hell don’t pop back open?” Dean turned his attention to passing a car that was inching along at five above the limit. “You’re gonna let the gates open again, aren’t you?”

“If I have to. I need my brother back.”

“Just like that, and no one else gets a say?” Dean shrugged. “Not the people who spend their lives hunting demons?  Or the Trans who risked their lives to close those gates?  Or all the people who'll die?  No? Then how about the parents who are gonna wake up some morning with their children’s blood on their hands?” Dean grit his teeth and gripped the wheel more tightly. “Does your brother get a say, then?”

“If Sam wanted a say, he should’ve stuck around to say it!” Dean roared. “And if anyone else had ever cared enough about Demons to close the gates, they should have let one of their brothers die to do it. I’m sick and tired of everyone else getting to live good lives in this world when they weren’t the ones who fought and bled and died to earn it.”

A few miles down the road, the vampire asked softly, “So now a seven-year-old has to earn the right not to eat her daddy’s liver?”

“So now I don’t have to give up my brother to earn it for her. And if she’s seven now, then God planned to end the world when she was three, which my brother and I put a stop to, twice, losing good friends along the way, and if I want the world to give me back this one thing, then I have goddamn earned that."

“I know," Benny assured him.  "I also know that I killed a mighty fine, endlessly loyal woman a month back for what she was doing to innocents.”

“She was killing!" Dean protested.  "I’m just…”

“Keeping people from not being killed. I get that there’s a line. It’s just as wide a line as I was remembering.”

“Benny? There a point to this, man?”

“I think I’d like to meet up with Andrea again. Make up. Show her the ropes of the afterlife.”

“Live together until one of you gets eaten?” he scoffed.

The vampire smiled wistfully.  “It’s not a good life in Purgatory, but it is a pure one. I think I’d like that.”

“So I’m just supposed to pull over and decapitate you at the next truck stop?”

“I’d be obliged.”

“I’m still getting Sam back.”

“I know. And I sincerely hope it lives up to your expectations. Myself, I read a story like this once, and plan to be gone before the big finish.”

 

* * *

 

So Dean was alone again in an old graveyard in rural Mississippi, shovel in his hand, shotgun and scythe propped against the headstone, reaching for a dead woman’s necklace and wishing with all his heart that when he’d walked into Rufus’s cabin all those months ago, Sam had still been there to meet him.

Demons rose and angels fell, and if Dean ever remembered his wish, he never took it back.

**Author's Note:**

> I did some research about John's journal for this, and it really is kind of creepy. In 'Jump the Shark,' Sam shows Dean that an entry from the time of Adam's conception had been ripped out, only it's clearly held together by three rings, so how could he tell? And how could every hunt from when John 'went to Missouri to learn the truth' to when he left coordinates in the pilot fit in such a little space, especially when you add the drawings and stapled-in newspaper articles? And if Dean had the book in his possession ever since the pilot, and the page from 'Pack Man' said that a bastard offshoot of djin could be killed with a knife dipped in lamb's blood, why didn't Dean know to take that kind of knife with him when he hunted the djin from season 2? And if John's father gave him the journal when he was four, why did he wait over twenty years to write the first entry? I eventually decided magical semi-sentience was the simplest explanation.


End file.
